Neglected landscapes and brownfields: new urban and territorial spaces for new communities

Changes are being seen in the morphological and functional relationships that regulate the urban and territorial structure, and therefore in the way of thinking about the city. To prevent homogenization with the wider world, local territories seem dedicated to reworking their own identities by referring not to physical forms, but rather, and especially, to functional relationships. The organizational dynamics that have marked the network of functional relationships in some areas of Italy such as the Veneto and Marche Regions in recent decades are emblematic and are being replicated in various forms and ways in other territories as well as national and European areas. The new power of functional, physical, and virtual networks seems to open new realms of meaning and to address the relationships between city, society, and economics in a new way. Deindustrialization contributes to delineating these new scenarios and offers the city a large supply of disused sites, which should adapt to the urgent needs of territorial rebalancing, entering as important nodes in the network of networks and responding to the different demands for land use. In the most internal and marginal areas, the theme of decommissioning is rather different. These areas are not affected by the typical phenomena of deindustrialization, but by decommissioning residential areas due to serious natural dynamics. For these areas, vast new meaning can be planned, anchored in renaturalization or the reinsertion of new urban and territorial reinforcement. These are new spaces dedicated to the collective identification of renewed local communities.